paid contractors paid by the pentagon still occupying afghanistan. the one change we have seen this year has been the withdrawal of the troops from iraq. that was the centerpiece from where u.s. troops were fighting around the world. now, we're looking at afghanistan as the biggest war zone that is acknowledged. the interesting thing that makes it difficult for people like you and i who want to look at where the u.s. troops are, the lists that we see are a very hard to actually get good information. i was looking yesterday at a few different lists on the pentagon's web sites. one of them is a list of personnel where are u.s. shoulders are. there are about 195,000 u.s. soldiers and marines that are based around the world. we hear in general they are in about 150 countries. when you look at the list, there is only about 40 countries listed. why is that? we are only listing the countries where there is more than 100 troops permanently based there. that is kind of weird because that means is only about 1/4 of the country -- about 1/5 of the countries whe